Carrier Aggregation in Multi-Beam High Throughput Satellite Systems

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is an integral part of
current terrestrial networks. Its ability to enhance the peak data
rate, to efficiently utilize the limited available spectrum resources
and to satisfy the demand for data-hungry applications has drawn
large attention from different wireless network communities.
Given the benefits of CA in the terrestrial wireless environment,
it is of great interest to analyze and evaluate the potential impact
of CA in the satellite domain. In this paper, we study CA
in multi-beam high throughput satellite systems. We consider
both inter-transponder and intra-transponder CA at the satellite
payload level of the communication stack, and we address the
problem of carrier-user assignment assuming that multiple users
can be multiplexed in each carrier. The transmission parameters
of different carriers are generated considering the transmission
characteristics of carriers in different transponders. In particular,
we propose a flexible carrier allocation approach for a CA enabled
multi-beam satellite system targeting a proportionally
fair user demand satisfaction. Simulation results and analysis
shed some light on this rather unexplored scenario and demonstrate
the feasibility of the CA in satellite communication systems.